Six on Sex 1: A Taste of Heaven

Obviously, I’ve been asked to talk on the topic because I know everything there is to know about sex. I mean you need to take only one look at me to realise that I must be an expert on all things sex. I like to think of myself as a cross between George Clooney and Brad Pitt. I’ve got George Clooney’s eye-brows and Brad Pitt’s nose hair.

Some of you may be approaching this series with some dread. You may be thinking that this series has really nothing to do with you, because you are not in a situation where sex is an issue. Some of you may be dreading that we won’t take the traditional line, and that you will be made to hear things you really don’t want to hear.

I expect that through-out this talk, and the talks that will follow over the next few weeks, you may hear things that you disagree with, or things that you offend you. It would be great if you came up to me or to David afterwards and told us about that. Might be good if you formed an orderly queue, maybe, and restricted yourselves to throwing just one rotten tomato each. The set-down team will be grateful if they don’t have to clean up quite so much.

Let me also say right from the start that the nature of the topic means that there will be plenty of opportunity for innuendo and double entendre. I mean, in this context you can say to English people “sand” and they’ll collapse in a heap laughing. And I just don’t get it. I mean, I’m half German right. There is nothing funny about sex. So, if I do say something that sounds like it might be a double entendre, you are welcome to have a quiet snigger to yourself. And if you can’t resist it you can poke your wife or husband or friend in the ribs and share the sniggering with them, quietly. But please don’t come to me afterwards to explain why what I said was funny, okay? I don’t want to know.

If we did a survey, I’m pretty sure that each one of us has an idea of what good sex is. And these ideas will be cobbled together out of what we’ve heard about sex, usually from our peer-group behind the bicycle shed, though at my school the bicycle shed was out of bounds, which is why I didn’t know anything about sex for a long time. More of our ideas will come from what we see on TV and in the movies, or from articles in magazines and newspapers.

I’d suggest that there are a few key concepts that will recur in our thinking about sex. So I made a list, and in the process I have been discovering how much my own thinking about sex has been invaded by these ideas. A lot of you will think you know what is coming next, so let’s see if you’re right:

• Sex is inherently good. You must therefore have as much of it as you can as often as you can. Not having sex is abnormal.
• Sex is at its best the first time you do it with someone new. The longer you have sex with the same person, the more boring it gets.
• Sex is good if your partner’s technique is good. Good sex is a question of technique and of mechanics.
• My first priority must be to satisfy my own desires.
• Good sex leads to good relationships.

Anyone willing to admit that you agree with one or more of these points? Maybe it sounds a bit harsh put like that, right? But it is nevertheless, I’d suggest, what surrounds us every day.

This view of sex comes out of a specific view of us, who we are as human beings. It will go something like this:

• We are animals, at base. We are programmed by our genes to have specific sexual urges and cravings, and there is really nothing we can do about it.
• In fact, we can be proud of ourselves for having done away with all the false myths about sex of our ancestors. At least we are honest enough to admit the truth – we are biological machines genetically programmed to pro-create as much and as fast as we possibly can.

That version of sex, this idea that people are so proud of having developed, is an incredibly impoverished version of what good sex really is. It is the equivalent of this: a mass-produced, manky burger that not only is bad for you, but tastes like card-board.

There is a counter to that myth of sex. I would call it the sticky Hollywood rom-com version of relationships:

• Your partner completes you. There is one person out there with whom everything will be perfect, whom you will have the most amazing sex with, and never think of anyone else again.
• Therefore, if you are in a relationship with someone and find someone else sexually attractive, that means your relationship is no longer working and you should really break up.

That too, is an impoverished version of relationships. It turns individuals into half beings, incomplete without being attached to another, and it reduces relationships to sexual chemistry.

It also reduces Jesus to half a human being. We have no record that Jesus had sex. We have no record that he was in a romantic relationship with a woman. Does that mean that he was only half a person, that he missed out on what is apparently the most important part of human experience? If Jesus is meant to be the model of the perfect human being, the human being as God intended him or her to be, then that can’t be true, can it?

Many of you will think: Ah but Erik, we knew that. We’re way ahead of you. We’re Christians, right? We don’t believe in these myths about sex. We know the truth.

The fact is, many Christians believe in an equally powerful, and an equally distorted myth of sex. It goes something like this:

• Sex is sinful, really. Sex is something Adam and Eve did after the fall. In fact, sex is what caused the fall in the first place. Sex distracts us from God.

It’s a myth that is re-enforced by reference to the fact that Jesus did not have a romantic relationship. But that too, is a deep-frozen hamburger version of sex, with extra lashings of guilt and misery thrown in.

Would it surprise you if I said that God disagrees with both versions of sex? That God’s idea of sex is much, much better?

To keep with our food analogy, the kind of sex God created us to have, that God intends us to have, is like this: a steak taken from a cow reared on the island of Mull, and prepared by a Michelin starred chef. God intended us to have memorable, intense, good sex, of a kind that Hollywood and Cosmopolitan magazine are far too impoverished even to imagine.

So, how do we get from the manky hamburger to the juicy steak?

I’ll let you in on a secret. It’s a secret the devil will do absolutely anything for you not to know:
Good sex has nothing to do with sex.
Let me rephrase that:
Good sex has nothing to do with the act of sex. It is much more than that.

And it’s not conditional upon marriage either. In fact, quite often, it can be absent in marriage.

Now, let me make something clear here immediately, right. I am not suggesting that everything we do is somehow connected to sex. That’s what some modern psychologists say. It reduces us, everything we are and everything we do, to physical sex. What I mean is the inverse: there is much more to sex than the physical act.

Rob Bell already mentioned by David, wrote in his book “Sex God” about the impoverished idea of sex:

Sex becomes a search. A search for something we’re missing. A quest for the unconditional embrace. And so we go from relationship to relationship [searching for it].

But that is not what sex is about.

But sex is not the search for something that’s missing. It’s the expression of something that’s been found. It’s designed to be the overflow, the culmination of something that a man and a woman have found in each other. It’s a celebration of this living, breathing thing that’s happening between the two of them.

David will pick this up again in the next few talks.

What is this living and breathing thing that a man and a woman have found between them? We find a good description of it at the very beginning of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, the book of origins, that records how things were when they were still like God intended them to be. There we are told the following about the first human beings, and it is the first time in the creation story that God says, “This is not good”:

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." … But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman, '
for she was taken out of man."
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Genesis 2: 18 – 25

It is not good for man to be alone. You know, it boggles my mind how men can take this passage and twist it to mean that women are inferior to men, because the woman was made out of the rib of the man? To me that idea is just another sign of the brokenness of our world, a product of the enemy’s attempt to steal from us the gifts that God intends us to have.

Because superiority or inferiority is profoundly not what this passage is about. And though it doesn’t mention one word of sex, it is all about sex, because sex isn’t about the physical act.

What else is it about then?

It is about this:
Sex is about honesty, intimacy and connection. It begins with the recognition that we are all made of the same stuff, even if we are fundamentally different, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. It continues with the complete naked openness and honesty between man and woman, one human being and another. Nothing is hidden, nothing is shielded from view. This honesty leads to intimacy – they know each other, inside and out, physically, emotionally and spiritually. That intimacy leads to connection, a physical and emotional and spiritual bond between two people that is so strong and so deep that they become one flesh. And they commit to each other, they are in this relationship for life. The overflow of that connection is sex.
Again, David will pick some of this up later on in the series.

That is why you don’t have to be married to be connected. In fact, single people are often also the most connected people. They are not closed off by being focussed on just one marriage partner.

Let me say something here that may shock you. This kind of intimate connection characterises the relationships that Jesus had with everyone he met, women as well as men. Let me give you an example. It is taken from one of the biographies of Jesus, written by one of his disciples, called John. He records the following event, which occurred shortly before Jesus was killed on the cross, and then rose again from death three days later:

Six days before the Passover, Jesus arrived at Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus' honour. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, "Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year's wages." He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it. “Leave her alone," Jesus replied. "It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me."
John 12: 1 – 8

Now, we do not really know who this Mary is. There is some speculation she might have been a prostitute, there is some speculation that she is Mary Magdalene, who later comforts Jesus’ mother at the cross.

But that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the relationship between Jesus and Mary. It is an intimate and connected relationship, based on complete honesty and transparency between them. Mary knew Jesus. She knew he was the son of God. She understood that this ordinary-looking man sat in her house having dinner was in fact the Messiah, the one sent by God to set us free from pain and suffering and death. She knew this because she had seen it, she had seen him raise her brother from the dead.

And she offers him the most valuable thing she has, not the oil, but the act of washing his feet with it, and drying it with her hair. In effect, what she was saying by doing that was that she belonged to him completely. There was no boundary between them anymore.

And how does Jesus respond? He doesn’t tell her that this is inappropriate, that they aren’t married, what will the neighbours think. Right? He accepts her, exactly the way she is, because he knows her completely. He looks at her and he thinks, “My God, my father, what an incredible job you did when you made her. Cor blimey, she is utterly amazing.” And he is committed to her. He wants her with him in heaven, he is willing to die so that she can end up in heaven with him.

Do you think that this relationship could have involved marriage and sex? It didn’t, we know that, but could it have done? I think so. Because in the end, sex is merely an overflow of what happens when two people share with each other the connection that Jesus shared here with Mary. When two people look at each other and they recognise in each other the absolutely amazing, awe-inspiring being that God created them to be, when we risk being open with each other, and honest, when we let ourselves be seen by the other, exactly the way we are.

Now, I can’t claim that this is how Birgit, my wife, and I relate to each other, all the time, right? We have our moments when we really connect with each other, when I look at her and I am amazed at this woman of God that stands next to me, and I marvel at the person God created in her. And occasionally she seems to think that there are some redeeming features to me, even if they are very well hidden. But these moments of connection between us are counterbalanced by many times when we are hardly connected at all, when we look at each other almost as strangers.

Because, I would suggest, we all fear that connection. Despite the fact that our world is saturated with images and talk and ideas about sex, we are deeply afraid of opening up to each other. Because being truly intimate with someone means letting her or him see me with all the failings and blemishes and imperfections and hurt that I prefer to keep hidden. And it gives that person the power to hurt me into the very core of my being, to rip out my heart and smash it to pieces.

I think that is why we are so obsessed with the sexual act. There is no better place to hide from someone than when you have sex with them. There is no better disguise than to be physically naked. You can strip sex of intimacy. In fact, I think the tragedy of our time is that so many people really have lost the faith that there ever could be anything more than physical sex. We have lost the belief that real intimacy could ever be real in our lives, and so we settle for physical sex instead.

It is in this connection and intimacy that good sex is a fore-taste of heaven. The kind of intimacy and connection that we only ever glimpse here on earth, that we only ever touch sporadically in our marriages and our friendships, is the way we will relate to everyone in heaven.

Because when we get there, we will finally realise that the imperfections and blemishes and mistakes that we try so desperately to hide, have in fact been washed away completely by what Jesus did for us. We will realise that there is nothing left that we would want to hide from view. In heaven, we will take complete delight in ourselves and in each other because absolutely everything about us will be delightful.

Let me rephrase that: When you get to heaven, you will take delight in yourself, because everything about you will be delightful.

So, in the next few weeks we will talk about how we come closer to the honesty and intimacy and connection that God intended for us. And we will talk about the things that get in the way, the things that pretend to offer us something similar or something better, but really are just lies and deceit.

To end off, let me sum up the main ideas:

Good sex has nothing to do with the act of sex.
Good sex is merely the overflow of a much deeper and much more profound process:
The deep and intimate and honest connection between two people who recognise in each other the astonishing and awe-inspiring creation that God made them to be.
Good sex is a taste of heaven.

Erik Peeters, 05/10/2008

Tags: sex topic